— janet mock, redefining realness: my path to womanhood, identity, love & so much more

Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, and So Much More - Janet Mock

Fave Five: Memoirs by Queer Black Authors How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones Redefining Realness and Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me…

Janet Mock, Redefining Realness

(via Janet Mock to receive Harvard University Artist of the Year award – Harvard Gazette)

“I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. It is an act that can be met with hostility, exclusion, and violence. It can also lead to love, understanding, transcendence, and community.” - Janet Mock

Janet Mock (born March 10, 1983) is an author, journalist, speaker and transgender advocate who was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to an African American father and mixed-race Native Hawaiian and European mother. Though Mock spent the majority of her youth and young adulthood in her home state of Hawaii, she has written about living in Oakland, CA;, Dallas, TX and New York, NY. Decidedly feminine from an early age, Mock made few efforts to hide her unique gender expression in her younger years despite ridicule from peers and sharp disapproval from her father. as one of the first steps in her transition from male to female Mock renamed herself Janet after Janet Jackson while in her first year of high school as one of the first steps in her transition from male to female. As is all too common with many but not all transgender women, Mock funded her medical transition through street-based sex work and underwent gender affirming surgery in Thailand at 18 during her freshman year of college. Not at all slowed down by her recovery, Mock resumed school and went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Fashion Merchandising from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2004, followed by a Master of Arts in Journalism from New York University two years later in 2006. After graduating from NYU, Mock began a staff editor’s position at People Magazine’s website, where she remained for more than five years. Eventually, Mock’s career in journalism migrated from small-time editor to big-time media advocate when she publicly outed herself as a transgender woman in a Marie Claire article written in 2011 that was, authored by a cisgender woman in Mock's voice. Ultimately, Mock took offense with how the magazine spoke over her by stating that she had been born and raised as a boy; when, in fact, Mock’s insistence on always being a girl deviates from the reductionist view of the author. Mock currently lives in New York with her husband, photographer Aaron Tredwell, whom she married in Oahu, HI on November 5, 2015